Friday, 22 May 2015

Step to it...

This evening I started machining the parts for the stepper motor mounting bracket, to complete the indexing system.The stepper will be mounted to a square plate fixed to a tube which transitions to a round plate screwed to the existing rotary table flange. My first action was to cut a piece of 6mm thick aluminium plate with a jigsaw. I keep promising myself a plasma cutter...it has to happen at some point! Next I squared this up to size on the milling machine. The plate is 56mm x 56mm, this being the standard NEMA 23 end face dimension.Next I bored a 38mm hole through the plate in the four jaw. The idea is that this will act as a locating feature for the 38mm register on the front face of the motor. Still located in the four jaw, the plate was then counterbored to 48mm to a depth of 3mm. This was done to locate the tube that will join the square and round sections of the mounting. I will be welding the whole assembly together once the other parts are made.Here is a photograph of the part thus far:-

I will hopefully get a chance to progress the mounting a bit further tomorrow. Keep checking for updates. Building this tool has taken me away from the actual design of the tube bundle chamber, so I intend devoting some time to that over the coming days.

About this blog

This blog describes the research, design and construction of a Liquid Rocket Engine.
As such it will include information regarding the design and construction of rocket engine components.
This will encompass theoretical and performance concerns, as well as machining, welding and manufacturing techniques used to overcome the various problems encountered.
In addition, my interests in this direction include control and data acquisition. So there will be posts regarding electronic systems and microcontrollers.
It is my hope that as well as being of interest to the rocket engine community, it should also become a repository of general amateur engineering information.
I was inspired to create a blog by the groundswell of interest that I have had in my project from people I have met. I have found that their reactions tend to go from perplexity to enthusiasm rapidly! The main question most people have is not to do with the technical obstacle to be overcome. Most of those who have asked me about my project have wanted to know "Why are you doing this?" So I will try to give some answers to this and to explore my motivation to think, research, create and construct.